FOI 56-2025 / Jan 2025 / Tasers
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 56-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 13th January 2025 as follows:
I am seeking information on the use of tasers by your police force in mental health settings.
Could you please provide the following specific information:
- A list of instances when tasers were deployed by members of your police force in mental health settings in the calendar years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
- A breakdown of each institution in which these instances of taser deployment occurred.
- The age of each person who was tasered in each case provided.
For the purposes of this request, the definition of ‘mental health settings’ includes:
- Mental health hospitals
- Mental health wards
- Mental health clinics
I am aware that police forces store this information, as per this BBC News article dated 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42820284
I am aware of the Section 40(2) Personal Information exemption. Please only provide details which would not identify the individuals involved.
Some parts of this request may be easier to answer than others, and should this prove to be the case, I would ask that you release available data as soon as possible rather than hold up the entire request.
Please provide these details by 7 February 2025, 20 working days after this request was submitted as per the 2000 Act.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that, for the period 1st January 2019 to 2nd July 2024, Taser use ‘location’ was not centrally recorded. Therefore, the requested information is not held in a readily retrievable format, and, in order to determine a response to the request for incidents recorded in that period, the details and wider documentation of each and every incident would require manual review. It is estimated that this would involve reviewing over a thousand incidents. At approximately 5 to 10 minutes per incident to review, this would equate to a minimum of 83 hours of work but could extend to over 166 hours. Therefore, the work required would exceed the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. For Police forces in the UK, the ‘appropriate limit’ is up to 18 hours of work on one request.
In accordance with Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; however, I am unable to suggest a way to revise this part of your request into one that could be answered within the fees limit. I can advise that since 3rd July 2024, the current system used to record Use of Force, including use of taser, provides an option to refine data by ‘incident location – Mental Health Setting’. Therefore, it may be possible to provide some information for the period 3rd July 2024 to 31st December 2024, should you wish to revise and resubmit your request.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.
Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information Officer
Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB